Down With The Sickness
Men's Handball, Slovenia vs. Croatia, came on the MSNBC, which is apparently now a sports channel. I can understand the impulse to be known as something other than the place who employs Joe Scarborough.

But I'm howling and screaming at the television, living and dying with each... wait a second. I don't even know enough about Team Handball to describe it in even the most general terms. Why in God's name am I sitting through this. It can't be interesting to me, not really. It's not even an American team playing. Do we even have an American Team Handball team?

Wait wait wait... oh no... I should have felt it coming on. The twitchy fingers, the over-stimulated adrenal gland, the increased susceptibility to syrupy lead-in personality profiles of athletes, the overwhelming urge to watch badminton, the full-body rash of itchy, festering boils...

It's here. I have it. Again. Every four years I get it.

I've got Olympic Fever.

It explains everything except the boils. I can't really account for those. But the ointment seems to be helping.

The six headed monster of NBCTelemundoBravoUSAMSNBCCNBC is showing up to 70 hours daily (!) of Olympic coverage.

Usually I would use this space to make fun of their eager-beaver earnestness and then point out the dark, cynical underpinnings of the whole corporate broadcast culture, but how am I supposed to have time to do that when women's fours coxless rowing is about to come on? I mean it's seventy hours a day. As a solitary human being limited by the linear progression of time and the inability to occupy more than one space simultaneously, I simply don't see how I'm supposed to keep up with this.

The amplified coverage has led to an amplified outbreak, at least in terms of intensity. I'm hoping the fact that the Fever has taken such complete hold so quickly will mean it will burn out sooner so two weeks from now I won't be trying to figure out how to watch men's trap shooting and tape mixed doubles table tennis at the same time.

I was actually disappointed by the USA-Puerto Rico basketball game. "Oh God, really?" you say. Really. I'm not kidding about this. I got it bad.

I even watched the "show" portion of the three-day equestrian event. That's show. Not jump, not run, not count by stamping on the ground, just show. The horses come out, they walk around, then they stop. There is some kind of objective scoring going on, but I will go to my grave never having known what it was. But I watched it, just like I'm supposed to. I even got a little thrill when the American horse came out.

What is wrong with me? I mentioned a few posts ago how I'm susceptible to hype. That's part of it, though you'd think I'd see it coming since it's a regular quadrennial event and all. But I find the fact that these people spend all their lives training for their one moment in the Olympic spotlight very compelling. That's the most disturbing part; my personality normally dictates that I make fun of people so myopic and single-minded.

OK here, let's try that. I will mock an Olympian.

Hey, there's that Michael Phelps swimmer guy. He was supposed to win 8 gold medals and he couldn't even... God, he couldn't even...

No, sorry, can't. It's too painful to talk about still.

If anyone knows of an antibiotic I can take for this, please feel free to share.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 6.0


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 12:29 PM